SOURCE: "A Critical Performance of Thorn Gunn's 'Misanthropos'," in The Iowa Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 73-87.

In the following essay, Brown asserts that the repetitive and interconnected structure of "Misanthropos" reflects Gunn 's poetic philosophy.

If one attends to his own experience of reading poems rather than to that of hearing a poet read poems in a crowded hall, he will, believe, agree that the performance to which a poem summons him is not so much a public recitation as it is a form of criticism analogous to the performing arts. If the poet is a performing self, as Richard Poirier claims, if no work of art comes alive except in the presence of an audience, as R. G. Collingwood argues, if the reader of poems must accept these claims, nonetheless he will modify them because of his recognition that the poet is always his own first...